The Roads to Rome

Introduction

There were white puffs of pecorino on top of the sauce, sharp and sheeplike, and chewy tubes of rigatoni beneath, cut from old bronze dies. I was eating with my friend, business partner, and chef, Paolo Vitaletti, inside a basement restaurant built into Monte Testaccio, in Rome. We could see the room’s crumbling walls, preserved behind a panel of glass, suggesting a catacomb more than a dining room. Those walls were made from the clay amphora, discarded and compacted over millennia, that had carried wines and olive oil from the fields of Lazio and beyond to Rome in ancient days. The provisions would arrive on boats along the Tiber or by carts on a road called the Via Appia. We were effectively eating inside a cave—a living relic of Rome’s culinary past. A cave carved into Rome’s grass-covered mountain of trash.

Seven years ago, Paolo and I opened a Roman restaurant in Bangkok, where we both live. Before we did, we thought it best to experience Roman and Italian food firsthand—and that subterranean restaurant happened to be where Paolo and I began our dig to unearth Rome’s most celebrated recipes. After years of food criticism and magazine writing, I had a working familiarity with Italian cuisine. But I’d never had a guide quite like Paolo, who grew up among the butcher shops and bakeries of Testaccio, and later, in the nearby suburb of Falcognana. Paolo is the sort who looks affectionately at a fine ham; when he speaks of his mother’s cooking, he becomes visibly wistful. He has a constant longing to eat his own cuisine, and to share his knowledge of it. Through his guidance, and my own realization of the breadth and beauty of Italian products, not to mention the quiet reverie of eating them, something rather simple—a trip to Rome, a few meals at the best trattorias—became a bit more complicated. I had always liked to know where food comes from, but a meal in Rome opens so many windows into the past. Just as the architecture—the monuments and ruins— speaks of great empires and eras of despair, so too, does the food. This connection of history, taste, and memory was fascinating to me. I was hooked.

And so before we opened our restaurant, Appia, Paolo and I set out to unwind and tease out our understanding of this cuisine, like so many strands of pasta wrapped around a fork. When you ask a Roman why they eat this thing or that, answers come naturally. “Ham should be from Norcia,” they might say, casually, or, “We’ve always eaten fried artichokes, because of the Jewish ghetto here.” This is perfectly fine if you’re Roman, but I’m not. So we needed to dig a little deeper. Paolo and I set off to research the food of Rome and the surrounding countryside together. To forge bonds with farmers and cheesemakers, and to cook in village kitchens. At first, for our restaurant. But as we traveled, it became clear that the journey we were on was something we wanted to share, beyond the walls of our restaurant.

That’s what started this long affair in Italy. Of traveling down the roads that led out from Rome, and into the countryside. Of farmers and shepherds and ancient mountain paths. Of sleeping in caves, and stealing peas for supper. Of sheep, and of meat.

Of understanding.

A month after our first trip—which led us to Norcia, a town hours to the northeast that is the home of Rome’s butchery tradition, and then later on to Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna—we sat in a coffee shop, agonizing over the name of our restaurant. For months, we’d been making porchetta, stuffing and sewing up pork bellies and loins, piercing the pig’s thick skin and pulling the butcher’s string tight. Afternoons were spent kneading pasta dough and cooking ragù over a lazy flame, preparing to open a Roman trattoria whose name still evaded us. “I was an ambitious chef,” Paolo says, “and after fourteen years in five-star hotel kitchens, I finally had a chance to cook the kind of food that moved me—the food I grew up on. We had to get this one right.” Together, we wanted to create a distinct, regional, and uncompromising Italian restaurant.

I kept a notebook full of names. Porcello. Posto. Taverna. Finocchio. Fatto. Every time I thought I had a great one, Paolo told me it didn’t sound right. Each time Paolo thought he’d nailed it, I told him it was too difficult to pronounce. 

“What about . . . Appia?” he said.

The name is derived from the Via Appia, the ancient Roman highway that connected Rome to the South, and to the Adriatic Sea, and it ran behind Paolo’s old house. He squinted his eyes, picturing the word in print, seeing if it fit. I loved its symmetry.

A few years ago, I was sitting behind the bar at Appia with Paolo. It was a gentle night, the kind of night in a restaurant where you can relax at the bar while keeping one eye on the room, or take off early and watch a movie with your wife, or maybe walk through a menu change. But instead, I poured two glasses of wine, and our conversation, and our mindset, began to drift back toward Italy.

As Paolo spoke, he sliced pieces of ham. Occasionally, he’d pass me one.

It had become clear—to Paolo, at least— that in our trips through Italy, we had a book on our hands, and that we needed to pursue it.

It was his stubborn persistence, rather than my own, that pushed us forward at first. I wanted to learn more so that I could understand the specific mechanisms of Italian cooking as comfortably as I had Chinese or Thai. I hadn’t written professionally in a few years, save for several short magazine pieces. The idea of sitting behind a keyboard, chasing down adjectives, or combing the corners of my memory for similes, was anxiety inducing. (It still is.)

The greatest trick a writer employs is connecting one idea to the next, I explained to Paolo. And when you’re out of practice, the storytelling process takes time. The transitions from one idea to another—once as effortless as a chef chopping an onion— suddenly become clumsy. We needed a strong structure, I argued. If not, this book wouldn’t make it past the first draft.

“Let’s drive down the Appia,” he said. “All the way to Brindisi. We’ll eat anchovies and the best semolina pasta, and burrata, and tomatoes . . . and meet some people we need to meet. The roads, Jarrett. The roads. We’ve been in Rome so many times. Let’s explore.”

That night I returned home and started to read a few of my favorite food writers. I paced around my small office, stacked with books and notes about cooking across the Mediterranean. I cracked open an ancient Roman cookery book, and another about shepherds and cheese. And though I’m not sure where I saw it, I came across an illustrated map of the Via Appia Antica.

It snaked south through the flats of Lazio, where beside it there were crude illustrations of sheep. And then, south of Naples it dipped past the ancient ruins of Paestum, where poorly drawn buffalo stood by the roadside. There were anchovies splashing in the Amalfi waters, and tomatoes growing just over the coast, near the outline of Vesuvius. All things we use in our food, and all along an ancient highway we’d named our restaurant for. That road fed the old empire through its expansion eastward, and through many centuries helped shape a cuisine. It was both a way forward, and a route to retrace the past. It was a means to explain the food we served, and it is, ultimately, the story of this book.

Roman food is mostly very rustic and simple. It is a product of the countryside, from the regions of Lazio, Campania, Umbria, and Abruzzo. It is a cuisine which has sprung from ancient traditions of shepherding and farming. It is mozzarella, salted codfish, anchovies, and artichokes. It is lamb, and pecorino cheese, semolina, ricotta, and guanciale. Platters of salumi, hand-cut fettuccine with a piquant ragù, and nose-totail mains. Meat that is to be cut with a sharp knife, rather than surrender to the pressures of a fork.

Looking at that dinky little map I found somewhere on the internet, I finally saw it: The Roads to Rome. A journey along the trails that fed the capital of an empire, that forever shaped the cuisine of the city. What would we see, traveling these roads? What would we taste? The only way, it dawned on me, to begin to understand the food of Rome is to try to understand the food all along the roads to Rome. And so the roads themselves became our guide. They wound through mountain towns and seaside ports. These roads, still intact after the fall of the empire, remained conduits for trade. And so we would go down them, too.

I called Paolo and Jason Lang, our friend and photographer, the following day, and we began to formulate a return to Italy. I printed out that map of the Via Appia Antica, and plotted points along its course that would lead us to food staples along the way. We’d already been working with a few of the producers for years; but now we would go see them, and cook with them, and connect our story with their past.

That last trip—before we shot the recipe photos for this book—all seemed to come into focus in a little Chinese restaurant near my house in Bangkok. I laid the map on the table, and we all riffed on how the Appia’s influence wound its way through Roman cooking, and how it had been there all along—too close to our noses to see, perhaps. We left lunch with a lightness. That feeling one gets before a long journey; the promise that lies in traveling down a road one wants to know.